Titan of the Atomic Era
Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov was born on January 12, 1903, in the Uralian village Simskiy Zavod, to the family of an assistant forester. In 1911, the Kurchatov family moved to Simferopol, where the boy went to school. Since childhood, he enjoyed good music and, up to a certain age, was a clear humanist. As it is often the case, his fate was decided by accident. He got hold of the book by O.M. Corbino titled “Achievements of modern technology,” which overturned his imagination. Igor started collecting and studying scientific literature. Dreaming about becoming an engineer, he studied analytical geometry on the university level, solving multiple mathematical problems.
These plans were nearly interrupted by the World War I, when the financial situation of an already not too rich family became even tougher. The father needed help, so engineering had to wait. Igor got a wood sawing job at a can factory, and in the evenings he worked at a tipping workshop. Soon he entered the Simferopol Evening Industrial School where he got the qualification of a mechanic. Despite the load, Igor kept reading avidly, becoming a straight-A student in the last two years; in 1920, he graduated from school with a gold medal. In September of the same year, he was admitted as a freshman to the department of physics and mathematics at the Crimea University, where he mastered a four-year course in just the three years of education and brilliantly defended his graduation thesis. In autumn of 1923, he went to Petrograd, where he was admitted to the third year of the shipbuilding department at the Polytechnic Institute. At the same time, he began working as an observer at the Magneto-Meteorological Observatory in Pavlovsk. His first experimental scientific work was dedicated to alpha-radioactivity of snow. In spring of 1924, Kurchatov interrupted his education at the Polytechnic Institute and got into scientific activity. The transfer of the famous physicist Abram Fedorovich Ioffe to the Leningrad Laboratory of Physics and Technology in September 1925 became the turning point of Kurchatov’s scientific life.
Complicated Things in Simple Words
Very soon, Igor Kurchatov earned a great reputation at the institute and received the title of the first degree research associate, and later — senior engineer physicist. In addition to research work, Kurchatov lectured a special course in dielectric physics at the department of physics and mechanics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and in the Pedagogical Institute. A brilliant lecturer, he possessed the art of communicating the physical meaning of described events and enjoyed great admiration by students. Being a young scientist himself, he often spoke about the results of his research, arousing in youngsters true interest to science.
A.F. Ioffe valued his students and never limited their freedom. When Igor Kurchatov started working at the Instituteof Physics and Technology (PhysTech), he was 22 years old, while the institute itself, by Ioffe’s words, wa “just seven years old, so young age of its associates is normal.” The institute was jokingly called “Papa Ioffe’s kindergarten.” Kurchatov was admired by co-workers for his enthusiasm, work efficiency, and aspiration to become a part of the team. His first printed work in the dielectric laboratory happened was a research on the passage of slow electrons through thin metal films. Solving this problem showed one of Kurchatov’s typical traits — he was able to precisely notice contradictions and anomalies and determine their nature with direct experiments. “This very feature,” Ioffe wrote, “led him to the discovery of ferroelectricity, to searching for mechanisms of current rectification, to studying nonlinearity of currents in carborundum surge arresters, to studying prebreakdown currents in glasses and resins, unipolarity of currents in salts, and later — to discoveries in the field of atomic nucleus…”
Igor Kurchatov’s talent manifested particularly bright in the discovery of ferroelectricity. In the end of 1929, A.F. Ioffe intrusts I.V. Kurchatov and P.P. Kobeko to unscramble the phenomena of abnormally high dielectric permeability of the Seignette salt. The result of the experiment led to abandoning the previous interpretation of this phenomenon and showed that the Seignette salt acts as an electric version of a ferromagnetic. The class of dielectrics possessing the same properties as the Seignette salt was named ferroelectrics. As a result, Kurchatov laid the foundation for a new field of science — ferroelectricity.